That's the problem with extremes Teachmum. The response to one extreme is always the other extreme.

Of COURSE some women and babies will benefit from judicious use of drugs - it's just that a awful lot of women end up only needing drugs because of intervention.

The "cascade of intervention" is not a myth, it happens to SO many women. In an ideal women would not fear birth, and would not seek to avoid a pain they knew was a positive thing. If that were the case midwives and obs would be SO used to seeing normal women labouring naturally they wouldn't interpret the normal sounds women make during labour as a desperate need for pain relief (that is a tough call, for almost all medical practitioners the easing of pain is a really important part of the job, it's hard to "switch it off" when the climate is not that labour pain is normal and healthy and ok but that it's agony and should be medicated asap), women wouldn't be offered drugs, wouldn't take drugs, wouldn't need drugs and complications like women who can't push effectively (epidural compication), baby's head getting stuck (deep transverse arrest, epidural complication), failure to progress (common after morphine administration), distressed baby (more likely during artificial augmentation of labour, often given to speed things up after morphine has slowed it down), "flat" (non-breathing) newborn (much more common after morphine/pethidine administration/epidural and c-section) would happen much less often. I know about 3 people (and i know ALOT of people) who had complications which were not caused or worsened by external interferance. Even fear, normal fear in normal women, can cause MASSIVE problems for labouring women, and yet how many women even on here have been told "If your baby isn't out in an hour/20 minutes i'm going to cut/use forceps/section you"? That is a PHYSICAL THREAT! And these threats are made routinely, and women tolerate it!

Women should be able to rely on their careproviders to support them, to tell them that labour pain is not injurious and that they can absolutely cope with it, but in the current medicalised birthing climate, sadly we cannot.

No-one is judging anyone by saying that drugs are dangerous, we are telling the truth. And if WOMEN will not tell women that birth is ok and for the vast majority of people (80-90%) can absolutely be done drug-free, then who will?

Bx

ETA - Mayaness, no-one has thus far been able to produce any detrimental effects on newborns from entonox use during labour. It is cleared from the mothers blood upon the 2nd breath of normal air, and, they theorise, IF it gets across the placenta the first breath clears it from the newborn. They've never been able to detect it in newborns or in cord blood and studies have shown identical outcomes for entonox only and totally drug-free labours. I did not know this until after my labour, when guilt made me look it up (because i had used it). In the USA they do not even OFFER entonox.